I’m sure we all have that player, maybe more than one that we just dislike or hate for nothing worth hating them for lol. For example, I can’t stand John McGinn. I just dislike his face and his cube-like body and that dumb goal celebration he does when he sprints like a child running to the ice cream machine and does that dumb thing with his hands lol.
Again, I shouldn’t hate him for those reasons, but I do. Anyone else have those players you just don’t like for odd reasons?
He drove drunk and crashed his car, whilst also breaking lockdown. Good dude is maybe a stretch imo
He’s a lovely simpleton, so he’ll always do stupid things. But not on purpose, he just isn’t smart enough to realise he’s doing something stupid and wrong. He’s a golden retriever in the body if a millionaire footballer.
Also blatantly got issues with drink, but we’re all just pretending it’s fine as he hasn’t got into the problem drunk stage yet. (
Grealish definitely deserves pelters for that, but by all accounts he has cut that sort of behaviour out and I think we can also all agree that most people probably shouldn’t be judged solely on their worst mistake.
I can agree with that. But I think it’s important not to completely ignore things like that. Drunk driving is a very serious problem and a number of footballers have been known to do it over the years. I believe Marcus Alonso crashed killing a passenger whilst driving drunk
Oh, absolutely. That is why I said he deserves continued criticism for that behaviour. But at a level that holds him accountable to not do it again, not at the all too common level of making it a chain around his neck for the rest of his life which often actually only acts to incentivise the behaviour, as what is the point of trying to be and do better when no matter the effort you’ll always be punished for that one mistake.
It’s the underlying problem with how we approach bad or dangerous behaviour in general. Sometimes the bad decisions or dangerous actions deserve more permanent consequences, but more often than not the more effective approach is temporary consequences and a focus on intervention and diversion.
My issue perhaps is the absence of even temporary consequences. Grealish wasn’t given, a 1 year suspension from the league for drunk driving, yet that was deemed appropriate for Tonali or Toney. From what I can recall, he faced no footballing sanctions whatsoever. I believe there was also an incident recently with Walker flashing people in a public place.
If someone other than a celebrity did that, they could face significant consequences.
I’m not calling for someone to be permanently banned or limited, but there has to be some material consequences in a footballing sense imo
I am not sure the Walker incident should really be included in discussion given it was very different from the other incidents you have mentioned. And the Tonali and Toney incidents were directly related to football and so had consequences within football.
Most of the time when players have driving related violations there are no consequences imposed in football because the consequences outside of football are considered sufficient (in the same way that additional consequences for most workers who do not drive for a living in other industries are not imposed). This has been the case with players at City, Liverpool, Newcastle, Brentford, and pretty much every other club in English football over the years.
Again, this not to excuse Grealish’s behaviour, but it does fall in line with what I was previously saying about intervention and diversion being the more effective strategy, rather than endless or exaggerated punishment (presumably as a misguided attempt at deterrence).
In Grealish’s case, he pleaded guilty to two charges for incidents that occurred whilst he was with Aston Villa (though neither were drink driving), was fined £82,500, and was banned from driving for 9 months. He also paid for all damages related to crashing in to the parked vehicles and made direct apologies to the owners, to the court, the public, and to the club itself for his behaviour.
As far as I am aware he hasn’t repeated such behaviour, even going so far as using a car service for his now infamous post-treble bender, and by all accounts has been a lovely bloke whilst at City.
He deserves continued criticism for doing what he did in the first place, as well as continued scrutiny of his actions moving forward as a role model for young people, but accepting responsibility and changing one’s behaviour after making bad and dangerous decisions is actually what we want to teach young people. And we also want to teach them that if they respond appropriately, they can be accepted as having “done their time” in those cases, as well.
Everyone is going to have a worst mistake in their lives—you and I do—and most of the time it is not so egregious as to warrant the total destruction of our lives as payment for the mistake. I think we tend to hold footballers and other celebrities to an exceptionally high standard that we wouldn’t advocate for ourselves or our loved ones. Sometimes that is appropriate, given their status, and I certainly don’t support celebrities being held to a lower standard than non-famous people. But sometimes I think we forget celebrities are human just like us, that they all make mistakes as we have (especially the young ones) and we go a bit too far with our expectations of how they should be punished.
Sure, let us define people completely for their lowest low